Should I give up on finding first ever contract

[fool]

I haven’t seen much dip in the testing market except for manual testing in the last 10 years.

Over the last 5 years I’ve almost always been involved hiring and it’s so difficult to find good QAs mainly in automation. So many bad ones out there that got into it for an easy street.

Most of my clients see testing/QA as one of the most important parts of the delivery team.

Learn some automation/cloud/big data and as much tech as you can. At least know what everything is when quizzed.

Don’t just list every tech you google.

It's easy to find automated QAs. They're called developers and they're the ones who should be writing your tests.

The problem is, the second you find an automated tester worth their salt, you're looking at someone who is at the very least a junior dev who'll enjoy being a dev and get paid more than being a tester.

However, it's much easier to sell Big co lots of different resources who can break repos with bad tests than it is to sell them more developers, so the struggle persists.

Obviously, what matters to people here is whether or not you can get decent a day rate from it, but the market will always be weird because it largely sits in an area of doing it wrong. This weirdly may make it a good niche though, because smart companies usually don't need contractors on the regular.

[Hobosapien]

Is functional testing (making sure the product meets the requirements and any user interface is polished for ease of use, responsiveness, and intuitiveness prior to UAT) no longer seen as a vitally important part of the delivery process?

Can't automate that to a decent level. Developers should not be doing that testing either.

[meridian]

Is functional testing (making sure the product meets the requirements and any user interface is polished for ease of use, responsiveness, and intuitiveness prior to UAT) no longer seen as a vitally important part of the delivery process?

Can't automate that to a decent level. Developers should not be doing that testing either.

Yes, that is a vital part of the delivery process but in a decent team that’s the developer’s job, not the tester’s. If the developer can’t even follow requirements then they shouldn’t be there.

Good testers spend most of their time on edge cases, looking for non-intuitive ways that the product can fail, etc.

[fool]

Is functional testing (making sure the product meets the requirements and any user interface is polished for ease of use, responsiveness, and intuitiveness prior to UAT) no longer seen as a vitally important part of the delivery process?

Can't automate that to a decent level. Developers should not be doing that testing either.

They're different things and some of them are relatively easy to test.

• Whether or not the user interface is usable is a UXers problem and arguably we should be doing user research to confirm this.
• Responsiveness can be measured and tested for. Profiling and tracing are needed anyways, so you just need the non-functional requirement.
• Making sure the product meets the requirements is a product owners problem. This would be done as part of delivery, where the task is added to the sprint and signed off by the owner.

I'm not saying nobody will ever load up the front end and check out the product just that this is unlikely to go to a manual QA / tester team. They're usually more focused on ensuring everything works, which is totally replaced by unit, integration, end-to-end tests.

Add in BDD, metrics, AB testing, CI/CD, tracing, anyalitics and profiling and you require development skills to undertake most of the tasks, and this is the only way to really move fast enough to compete in any sort of competitive market.

There's still a number of shops that are still in the past, so I'm not saying you'll never work but they're dwindling, thus the advice is to retrain. Internet advice and all that though, draw your own conclusions.

[BigDataPro]

Is functional testing (making sure the product meets the requirements and any user interface is polished for ease of use, responsiveness, and intuitiveness prior to UAT) no longer seen as a vitally important part of the delivery process?

Can't automate that to a decent level. Developers should not be doing that testing either.

Usability, Accessibility, Performance are subjective unless otherwise specifically written down. Functional testing can be easily automated.

[paul555]

Thanks for the honest comments. I have been thinking the same thing about Manual Testing. I guess I will have to go down the permanent route where you learn automation on the job.

I have looked into automation with Selenium and I have a good overview of it. I have never actually done it in Business though. So I can't go for those roles where you need to hit the ground running

Slight issue is that I see Automation as a Developer in Test role and I don't really want to be a Developer if I'm honest. I can't imagine many Developers want to move into Test though.

I think there is still a need for Manual Testers but that seems to be shrinking. I don't know what I can do instead though if I have been doing testing for 15 odd years. I feel a bit stuck

[NickFitz]

When you talk about applying for roles there aren't really any to apply for. Total Jobs, LinkedIn and the usual suspects don't have any roles other than old ones posted weeks ago

FWIW, every single contract I've had in twenty years that didn't come my way through personal contacts, I've found through JobServe.

Even if you decide to consider permanent positions too, keep plugging away at whatever contract possibilities show up in the meantime. Good opportunities turn up even in the most sluggish market conditions

[meridian]

Should I give up on finding first ever contract

Thanks for the honest comments. I have been thinking the same thing about Manual Testing. I guess I will have to go down the permanent route where you learn automation on the job.

I have looked into automation with Selenium and I have a good overview of it. I have never actually done it in Business though. So I can't go for those roles where you need to hit the ground running

Slight issue is that I see Automation as a Developer in Test role and I don't really want to be a Developer if I'm honest. I can't imagine many Developers want to move into Test though.

I think there is still a need for Manual Testers but that seems to be shrinking. I don't know what I can do instead though if I have been doing testing for 15 odd years. I feel a bit stuck

Automation done well is, as you say, a developer-in-test role or SDET. However, even for a non-automation tester you need to know automation tools to make your job easier - automating data setups, etc. Simple scripting and SQL gets you a long way.

Apart from your CV, what else have you done to showcase your skills and get your network going? Do you have a blog, Twitter, etc? Go to conferences to network in the testing world? Local meet-ups, Ministry of Test, UKSTAR, ALF if you’re moving towards test management, etc.

ISTQB cert is next to useless in the real world, but is usually required by agencies (god knows why). Plenty of free training material for this on the net so you’re only paying for the exam.

Specialise so that you might be a generalist, but an expert in a small area. For example, if you’re a Web tester then get to know Chrome developer tools like the back of your hand, highlight the technical details in your cv, write a couple of blog posts on it. Find your niche, become an expert in it, and push for roles that need it.

[fool]

Slight issue is that I see Automation as a Developer in Test role and I don't really want to be a Developer if I'm honest. I can't imagine many Developers want to move into Test though.

I think there is still a need for Manual Testers but that seems to be shrinking. I don't know what I can do instead though if I have been doing testing for 15 odd years. I feel a bit stuck

Sorry to beat the drum here, but pretty much all doing roles around IT dev are becoming dev roles. You really want to push into managment if you don't want to be writing sort sort of code, whether that be tests, terraform, or apps.

Depending on skills and age, I'd consider getting a permy job where you can push into managing owning requirements, team leadership or some agile resource such as scrum master. An example would be moving into InfoSec project assurance where you require DAST and SAST scans to run as part of a pipeline, but don't actually run them yourself.

If you don't fancy that, being an azure/o365 guy will buy you more time in the industry. There's of growth and cowboys there, thus it'll be a while before everyone demands full on devops.

[cannon999]

Automation testing have not and will not replace manual testing in any near future. If you are a good manual tester with a solid CV - you will find contracts.